Re: [Audacity-devel] non-ascii labels

[Leland <aud...@ho...>]

Hi Stuart,

Thanks for the detailed descriptions.  It helped a LOT!

> 
> "Leland" wrote:
>> Okay Stuart, let's try this again. :-)
>> 
>> http://audacity.sourceforge.net/files/audacity-win-1.3.1-unicode-beta.zip
>> 
>> This is a "debug" build so it will be a tad bit slower when import files and
>> such, so that's what's going on if you think it to be sluggish when doing
>> certain things.
>> 
>> I will try to get a "release" unicode project setup this weekend unless
>> someone else wants to do it????
> 
> This one won't let me enter any japanese characters into a label at all.
<snip>
> fine except after I type the return nothing appears in the label text box.

I believe I've corrected the issues you were having.  It was actually a
small 2 line change, but as I was testing, I realized that Unicode keyboard
handling on the Mac was having issues as well.  Unfortunately, this expanded
the changes a tad. :-)

The IME input will not go directly to Audacity as it can with "supported"
apps.  The labels aren't standard TextBox controls so the IME doesn't
recognize them.  Heck, they aren't controls at all...  :-)

But, you should at least be able to enter characters now.  There was a
problem where the Unicode characters above 300 were not being accepted.

There is a weirdness though.  When the characters are displayed in Audacity,
they are rotated from what they looked like in the IME.  Is it supposed to
do that or is it just my system???

Anyway, try downloading it again from:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/files/audacity-win-1.3.1-unicode-beta.zip

> 
> I can enter an placeholder ascii label, open the Edit Labels dialog and
> and change the label in there to japanese characters (*).  When I do, the
> correct text appears in the label track.
> (*) There is some weirdness here too.  I click in the cell for the label text.
> The IME entry text box appears in the upper left area of my screen as
> usual.  I type in several japanese characters and a return.  Only the first
> character appears in the cell.  However any subsequent characters I
> type are ok, and now, the IME entry and composition window is congruent
> with the cell instead of in the upper left screen somewhere.
> 
This is an interesting one.  Here's what's happening...

The grid works in 2 "modes", display and entry.  To switch into entry mode,
the grid uses the first valid character entered to enable and show the edit
control.  It then passes on the captured key to the edit control.

When you try to send multiple characters from the IME, only the first will
be sent to the edit control.  Then, once the (standard Windows) edit control
is visible, the IME will start sending further characters directly to it.

The only solution I have for you is to double click the label cell first to
activate the edit control and then start entering text with the IME.

> When I save the project and reopen it, I get an error messge,
> "Error: not well formed at line 148".  Line 148 is the first label line
> that contains japanese text.  The encoding of the .aup file appears
> to be cp-932 (the default for my system).  I'm non-sure why the
> non-unicode build would produce a valid utf-8 file, and the non-unicode
> build would produce an illegal xml file (since there is no encoding
> declaration in it, the xml reader will assume utf-8, but it is actually
> cp-932).
> 
This is a definite problem and one that I'll have to ask the others for
advice on.  Basically, we need to be able to allow and handle Unicode
strings within the aup file.

> When I export the labels, then import them, they are imported
> correctly.  The labels file encoding also appears to be cp-932.
> 
We're just getting lucky with this one since we expect the start and end
times to be in plain ASCII and allow the label test to be in Unicode.

A couple of us were tossing around the idea of changing the label export to
write XML files instead.  But, we'll have to hold off on that until we
figure out how we're going to handle Unicode in the various XML files we
create.

> As an aside, I also found the following to be frustrating, but maybe
> because I don't really know what I'm doing yet...
> 
> If I select a section of audio, type ctrl-B, I get a label text box.
> If I type a return, the box disappears.  If I type ctrl-B again,
> nothing happens. (Because the the label track now has focus
> rather than the audio track?)  I couldn't figure out how to return
> focus to the audio track without loosing my selection (annoying
> if it took some work to get the right selection.)
> 
This should be corrected also.

> And, it would be really nice if there were some way to make the
> Edit Labels dialog non-modal so that one could listen to selections
> while editing the info in the Label Edit dialog.
> 
Yes, this would be desirable, but the main issue is that if it were made
non-modal, there would have to be some way to coordinate changes between the
dialog and the project window...if a label is changed in the dialog, it
would also have to change in the project at the same time.

I'll look into it but it probably won't make it into 1.3.2 or 1.4.0.

Leland